


The Djinn

by Mad_Birdy



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Djinn Character, Gen, Monsters Aren't Always Monsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 11:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14496339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Birdy/pseuds/Mad_Birdy
Summary: Kamaria is a djinn who has lived for centuries, avoiding the hundreds of hunters who have chased her over the years. Now, though, she has come up against the Winchesters and so she sets out to see if the hunters will listen to reason.





	The Djinn

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a song fic challenge in 2017, "Monsters" by Ruelle

My heart pounds in my throat as I run down an alley, not daring to throw a glance over my shoulder as I flee. Mama always told me to watch out for hunters, and now here I am, running from two of North America’s best known. I dash around a corner and curse loudly; dead end. The sound of footsteps grows louder and I look around, trying to find an escape. Bags of trash and dumpsters and shoddily-locked doors meet my eyes and a plan forms quick enough for me to enact it.

Sam and Dean Winchester, hunters of the supernatural and monsters in their own right, speed around the corner, guns drawn. They hesitate at the sight of the empty alley, then continue down it, cautious of the many hiding places I could be in. I watch them from behind a pile of trash bags. Dean notices a door broken open with a light blue trace of magic on it and moves closer to it, Sam turning his back to me as he covers Dean. Moving quickly, I get behind Sam and reach up to touch his temple, knocking him out and sending him into a dream.

I duck behind a dumpster, which puts me in Dean’s blind spot when he turns at the sound of his brother hitting the ground. “Sam!” he says, nearly a shout, and hurries to kneel beside him. “Wake up!” Then he’s also on the ground, a touch from my hand putting him into a nearly identical dream as his brother’s.

My breathing is ragged and my heart is still racing a mile a minute, but the threat is over, for now. Rummaging around in Dean’s pockets, I find the keys to his car. Back to the diner they’d chased me from, then I drive the classic Impala to the alleyway and manage to drag the overgrown men into their car to make it look like they fell asleep while parked at the curb. They’ll sleep for about an hour or so, giving me enough time to head out of town for somewhere quieter.

Maybe, while they’re out and after I’ve made it a fair distance, I’ll take a minute to plant an idea in their minds. An idea that not all monsters are truly monsters. And maybe I’ll tell them some of the bedtime stories my mama would tell me before sending me to sleep.

~~~

_ Since the beginning of time, there have been monsters among the humans. God created his humans, but Eve was the mother of monsters. Her first children were the Leviathans and the Alphas, and from the Alphas came the rest of us. _

_ The world was large, and our Alphas led us to settle far from each other so that our feeding grounds wouldn’t overlap. The djinn settled in the Middle East, our dark skin ideal protection against the harsh desert sun. _

_ Humans were easy prey at first. Gullible and soft, unaware of the danger in the world. Some fought back, of course, but were unsuccessful… and then, by a fluke, a butcher discovered how to kill us: a silver blade, coated in the blood of a lamb. _

_ Soon, the butcher’s family started to hunt us, and we were forced from our homes, unable to pass as human. We retreated to ruins in the desert and resorted to luring in unwary travelers with the promise of making their deepest desires come true. _

_ We survived, for a time, content to gain our sustenance in this way. The djinn slowly spread out, taking to caves as well as ruins for shelter. The Alpha remained near to the town she had originally settled in, taking two humans every few months. One to turn into another djinn, and one to teach the newborn how to feed. _

_ Then hunters started moving around the world, meeting other hunters and exchanging information. They spread stories of monsters hiding in ruins on well-traveled roads, taking victims by night or day. It became harder for the djinn to survive, so we evolved again, taking to dark alleyways and unsuspecting passersby in the cities we had previously abandoned. _

_ I was born in the upper room of an abandoned building in the year 1 BC, child of the Alpha and a newborn male djinn. My father died quickly (he was far too brash and careless), and so my mother and I moved to a different city. _

_ She would tell me stories of hunters, of how merciless they were in their killings. How they would single-mindedly track down any creature they believed to be in the wrong and kill them, no matter how much evidence pointed to their innocence. She warned me to never trust a human, no matter how harmless they seemed, because any of them could have the knowledge of a hunter. _

_ Hunters are the real monsters, she told me. And they have yet to prove her wrong. _

~~~

The man laid out on the fold-out couch is pale and gaunt, nearly dead. And good riddance, too. The man was an abuser and child molester, set free on a technicality. Now he’s living in a dream world where he went to prison, as he should have, as I feed off him. I remove the tube in his arm that was slowly draining him of blood and close it off, wrapping it up with the blood bag and putting into a special container. It’ll stay at body temperature in there, ready for me to drink from when I need it.

I fast forward the dream he’s in, giving enough poison to end his life within a few minutes. As he lays there twitching in REM, I pack my bags and leave. It’ll be a race to see who finds the body first, the cleaners or the Winchesters, but either way, my message will be clear. I place a folder with the man’s history on his chest and leave.

~~~

_ Everyone knows the Winchesters. That is, every supernatural creature in North America, from the youngest child to the oldest scarred survivor, knows the Winchesters. Either from personal experience or from stories told like horror tales around a campfire. _

_ They’re practically serial killers. If the government knew about all the people dead at the hands of the brothers, they’d use all their resources to track them down and arrest them. They’d be put on trial and sentenced to death or life in prison. _

_ The members of the supernatural community know to stay clever to stay one step ahead of the Winchester men. Even just one misstep can lead to death at the hands of a weapon specifically made to end us. They know our weaknesses, and so we must learn theirs in return. _

_ Their greatest weakness is each other. Story after story tells of one sacrificing himself for the other. But there are more. Dean has weaknesses for junk food and sweets, a good woman, and a night of drinks and pool. Sam is harder to gauge; some stories spin him as the more compassionate and more likely to spare someone if they’re proved innocent, but some tell he’s the more aggressive and ruthless. The only weakness mentioned is demon’s blood, but then it turned into a strength. _

_ The magic of the djinn allows us to see our victims’ greatest fears and most desperate wishes. For a long time, we thought that if we could grab the Winchesters, we could learn their weaknesses. However, the only djinn able to capture Dean was quickly killed by Sam, and so they remain a mystery. But not for long…  _

~~~

It’s months before the Winchesters catch up with me again. This time I’m prepared for them and the empty warehouse I’ve made my home is set up as a trap. I wait, hidden in the rafters, watching them as they search the building for me. Dean’s the first to go down, his ankles caught in a noose that drags him up towards the ceiling. As Sam shouts, I dash over to the older brother and grab his arm, letting the poison in my magic seep into his skin to knock him out.

Sam takes longer to catch. After watching Dean disappear towards the ceiling, he’s wary of my traps. So I allow him to wander, lose himself in the maze I’ve made, and when he’s stuck up against a dead end, I drop down on a rope to land silently behind him. “Sam,” I say, my voice soft.

He spins around, silver knife flashing in the low light. His face is almost confused, but then his jaw clenches and he steps forward. “Where is Dean?”

“Safe.” I hold my hands up and take a step back. “I merely wish to talk, but the two of you make that difficult.”

“Talk?”

“Think about it. If I’d wanted to kill you, I would have done so months ago when I got the better of you in that alleyway.”

The tall hunter hesitates, just for a second, and that’s my opening. Rumors of the younger brother’s empathy aside, it’s too risky to hope he’d disarm willingly. I dart forward and knock the knife out of his hand, reaching up to render him unconscious. He falls with a thump and I fashion a harness for him out of the end of the rope. The system of pulleys in the warehouse helps me get Sam up to the room where his brother is.

~~~

_ The Winchesters are broken men. That much is certain, now that their inner selves are laid bare for me to see. Raised in the hunting life, led by a father who was more like a drill sergeant. Who believed he was doing what was right and that it was the best he could do given the circumstances. His abuse was unintentional, but it was abuse and neglect nonetheless, and both of these men have suffered for it. _

_ Dean’s crippling fear of not being good enough, of failing to protect his brother, is a result of too much responsibility given to him in his childhood. His own self-righteous need to be the one in charge, the one who is right and makes the decisions. Dependency on his brother leads him to make selfish choices which only hurt others, and he falls into the pattern of the same kind of unintentional abuse as his father. _

_ Sam is the outcast, the unworthy, unclean child. Strove to fit in but realized it was futile and ran away, only to be brought back into the life by the same kind of disaster that made his father begin. His compassion and large heart comes from knowing what it means to be unloved and his desire that no one else feels that way if he can help it. But years of abuse, both physical and psychological, have broken him and made him into a man who believes that he has no choice but to live the life his father chose for him when he was six months old. _

~~~

I’m seated in an armchair, watching the Winchesters as they wake from the dream I gave them that explained my actions. They’re tied to their own chairs, immobile for the time being. “Welcome back to the world of the waking,” I say with a smirk. Dean growls and jerks against the rope, but Sam just looks at me thoughtfully, and I know he at least was paying attention in the dream.

“I swear to god,” Dean says. “As soon as I’m out of these ropes--”

“You’ll kill me, yes,” I interrupt. “Give me five minutes, though, and maybe you’ll rethink that decision.”

“You only kill people you think deserve it, right?” Sam asks, voice quiet.

“Right.” I smile slightly at him. “Criminals who got off clean because of corruption in the system.”

“Who are you to decide that?” the older Winchester says. “Who gave you the right?”

I raise an eyebrow, turning my attention back to him. “Who gave you the right to kill my kind and other beings like me? A drunk, obsessive ex-soldier looking for revenge for his dead wife?” That shuts him up, and I soften my expression, continuing. “I read stories in the papers of killers who get away because of a technicality, rapists whose victims are too scared to testify. The system is bogged down with cases and, more often than not, small time criminals, local ones who don’t make the news, get away and keep hurting people. So I make sure they pay for their crimes and allow myself to survive without harming innocents.”

Sam watches me, thoughtful expression on his face still, but Dean shrugs. “So what? You’re still killing people.”

“So are you.” I sigh, standing. “Look, I’ll stop killing criminals the second you stop killing ‘monsters’.” My fingers form air quotes and he rolls those bright green eyes of his. “You know you two are just as much monsters to the supernatural community as we are to you, right?”

Dean scoffs, but Sam looks down, something almost like sorrow in the lines of his face. “I know there are stories about us in the hunter world,” the younger man says. “I’m sure there are similar ones in your world too.”

I nod. “You two need to realize that the world isn’t made up of black and white. It’s more about gray morality than you think. I know covens of witches who work to improve the lives of the humans they share neighborhoods with, vampires who drink only from animals, werewolves who abstain from human hearts. Do they deserve to die just because of something that happened to them?” The two men are silent. “Of course not. Just as you two do not deserve to die despite the demon blood and becoming a demon.”

“How do you…” Dean starts, eyes narrowed.

“Djinn know the wishes and fears of humans, and are in their minds to control the dream when they feed off them. I’ve seen inside both of you while you were sleeping.” Dean growls again, and I almost feel guilty about the look of fear that crosses Sam’s face. “So here’s my deal. You two stop hunting me, and spread the word to other hunters to leave me alone. Make sure you take care from now on to double-check that the ‘monster’ you’re hunting is actually guilty, and I’ll do the same for my targets. In return, I’ll let you go, no worse for wear.”

“How do we know you’ll keep your end of the deal?” Sam asks.

“Trust me, the day I start killing innocents is the day I come to you and tell you I’m done living.” I step towards him, ignoring him flinching away as I untie him and let the ropes drop to the floor. “You have your freedom and your life. All I ask in return is my own.” Sam stands, and then holds out his hand. I shake it warily, but he smiles a little at me.

“Go,” he says, stepping over to Dean. “You have our word. And know we’ll find you if you break your promise.” I nod and leave, walking away quickly as Sam frees his brother.

“You’re just letting her go?” The older Winchester’s voice is loud and incredulous, and I smirk as Sam answers, though I can’t make out what he says. I look down at my cell phone as I get in my car, smiling at Sam’s number in my contacts. I’ll keep an eye on them, and maybe one day, hunter and hunted can work together for a common goal, for good.


End file.
